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Everything posted by IanD

I didn't say "no" genetic drift, I said "little" -- which is what other reports have said. All viruses mutate over time, it's the ones that mutate rapidly and change a lot that are a huge problem because by the time you've got a vaccine it no longer works. The balanced view was that Covid-19 is not one of these, it's much more stable than a lot of the viruses previously examined, so a vaccine has a very good chance of being effective for a long time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronavirus-vaccine-mutation-covid-19-latest-a9423301.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/low-coronavirus-mutations-mean-hope-for-a-single-vaccine.html

Researchers who compared the genetic makeup of Covid-19 from the early Wuhan cases with newer cases from around the work have found very little genetic drift or mutation, which is a good thing because it means that any cure or vaccine is likely to stay effective for some time rather than being "out-evolved" by Covid-19.
This is far preferable to a virus that mutates rapidly, for obvious reasons...

Direct anger where you like, that's all fine and understandable -- lots of governments are to blame here, ours and China included.
Misinterpreting reports and making it sound like Chinese test kits are going to be responsible for huge numbers of deaths when this is clearly not the case, that's not fine. Keep on doing it after facts have been produced showing it's not true and people may suspect what the real motive is...
I'm going to keep on saying Fox News is a reprehensible factory of lies biased against people of other races, countries and religions and stirring up prejudices against them -- the definition of racism -- until they stop doing it.

Fox News is racist by any sane person's definition; following Trump' s policies they propagate "fake news" about Mexicans, Chinese, Muslims, in fact pretty much anyone who isn't white, American and Republican. Unfortunately their clickbait-driven headlines spread around the Internet like a plague...

No, it came over that it seemed to be what *you* really think...
You seem to be ignoring the fact that if people are older and vulnerable and worried they're the most likely people to be looking for advice, and they tend to listen to "friends" which means places like this. What do you suggest they read, the Daily Mail? [BE SCARED OF EVERYTHING, ESPECIALLY IF IT'S FOREIGN!!!]

<sigh> Older people are more vulnerable (this is what the Covid-19 statistics show). The age profile on this forum is tilted towards older people than the general population (go and look at the profiles). Older people tend to be less computer/Internet savvy and more likely to believe what they read without checking on the veracity of the sources (go and look at any number of investigations into who believes "fake news" -- or the age profile of the Daily Mail...). I'm the last person to be patronising about this, but I'm concerned about the bad effect that "fake news" has on people.
This is not saying that every older person is not computer/Internet savvy -- I've got an LT Freedom Pass, and every word you read on here almost certainly passed through a chip I've designed in the last 10 years -- but statistically there are more of them/us on here than (for example) a forum on tuning the Vauxhall Corsa. Going by responses on the forum to threads like this it's obvious that a lot of people on here are worried and looking for advice, and *don't* go digging into the facts when they're told they should be worrying about something. They're not all older, but many are.

You're not the one the post was aimed at. It's not a complex test for companies who know how to do it, which includes many companies in China as well as everywhere else in the world. With testing kits as with so many other things, if you want to get stuff made quickly in vast quantities China is the best place to do it, they have the infrastructure and component supply chains set up to do this, which is exactly why so much stuff is made there.
Yes there's a risk that this is not just one rogue batch, but there's no evidence that this is the case. Even if there are other (small) rogue batches, the overwhelming likelihood is that the vast majority of the kits are OK. What the world needs right now is huge quantities of kits as fast as possible; even if the "rogue rate" in China was as high as a few percent (no evidence of this) it would still be better to have lots of slightly-less-reliable Chinese kits (if they *are* less reliable...) than smaller quantities of slightly-more-reliable Western kits (if they *are* more reliable...), that's just how the numbers work.
Honestly I think there are far more useful and concerning things to worry about than this, especially things that you can do something about which might improve the lives of you or others.
Are you saying that you don't care about older/vulnerable people, or they shouldn't live on boats, or shouldn't read this thread? Given that we're all supposed to be helping each other out, especially the older and more vulnerable (who are most likely to be taken in by "fake news), and the demographics say that a lot of boaters fall into this category, and lots of boaters read this forum and look to it for advice from "friendly" sources, I don't see where you're going with this...

The comment wasn't aimed at you, it was aimed at the poster (his own words, no wriggling out of that) of this :
"The Spanish have found that only 30% are giving correct results - this could mean that a huge number of people who believe they are negative are actually a huge health risk to the rest of the population. "
To put some real numbers in, 5.5M "good" kits with 80% success rate (20% error rate) would give 1.1M wrong results, but this is normal and acceptable. 9000 "bad" kits with 30% success rate (70% error rate) would give 6300 wrong results, which is 175x fewer than the "good" kits, but this is terrible and unacceptable?
Please, *please*, stop posting panic-inducing clickbait headlines or "facts" which are not backed up by the facts -- there are a lot of older and vulnerable people on this forum who are maybe not quite so savvy about "fake news" and the way it spreads, and the last thing they need is to be worried about things like how reliable "Chinese test kits" are, or that quack remedies will protect them.
Actually *anybody* fearmongering should consider that if their posts convince anybody to either give up taking notice of genuine medical advice or think that doing something makes/proves them immune to Covid-19 or to refuse/ignore tests or that they might as well go out and mix with people because we're all going to get infected anyway, any resulting deaths are *their* fault -- saying "fake news never hurt anybody" is dissembling bullsh*t.
It's disgusting behaviour. Stop it. Now.

20 years, ha -- just checked, it's the BBC book originally published in 1982, ours is from 1984 (no wonder the pages are stained!) so we've been cooking that recipe for 36 years -- and I still love it 🙂

It also says that China has supplied 5.5M kits, out of which one batch of 9000 from one unapproved manufacturer has been found to only be 30% accurate not the expected >80% -- so less than 0.2%.
Given that "good" kits aren't 100% accurate (>80% is the requirement), the headline is pure (racist anti-China Fox News) scaremongering -- if it persuades even a few people not to use the Chinese kits, more people will die as a consequence.
Or we could do what Trump would probably do and reject 5M foreign Chinese kits in favour of 1M home-made American kits -- yeah China can churn 'em out faster and cheper, but ours are better...
Please read the real facts not clickbait headlines before forwarding scare stories, this does nobody any good (except the source of the "fake news"...)

So why did you used to keep making regular posts about the imminent collapse of the EU, and how much better off we'd be without it, or bad news about the economies of EU members like Germany ? If the cap fits... 😉

Me too -- but just a note in case you haven't been there recently. When I was there a few months ago the beer was still great but the new licensees seem to be trying to get in more of the yoof market -- not a bad thing for a business, but I want to sit in a pub and chat (like on previous visits) and not be irritated by (fairly loud) music in the background... 😞

You're still completely missing the point -- diagnostic tests for any illness are *never* 100% accurate anyway, anything over 95% is seen as excellent, anything over 99% is seen as ideal (and the expected value for the Covid-19 tests is only "better than 80%") -- so 0.2% of faulty kits has negligible effect on safety for either nursing staff or patients.
What has *way* more effect is having *enough* kits, and factories in China can churn them out faster than anywhere else -- and cheaper, if you think this matters (the NHS is paying after all, which means us in the end).
If a significant percentage of the kits had been faulty then this would be cause for concern. Making 0.2% out to be a major threat is anti-China scaremongering pure and simple, it's what Fox News do every day.

So here's a choice for you. You can have 5M test kits from China, 4.99M of which work, 10k of which don't. Or have (for example) 1M test kits from Europe (because we can't make them in anywhere near as big volume as China) of which 1M work -- and the cost to the NHS is the same at the 5M Chinese kits.
Which saves more lives, including those of your family?
(clue: if you have 100% chance of getting a Chinese kit of which 0.2% fail, you only have a 20% chance of getting a European kit)
A small percentage of faulty kits is *way* less dangerous than not having enough kits -- quite apart from the fact that working kits will never be 100% accurate anyway, there are always false positives and false negatives in any test, 99% accuracy is generally seen as close to "perfect".

So maybe you could check the veracity of links/headlines designed purely to get clicks and cause panic before posting them?
"The problem with the Internet is that lies can run around the world before truth has got its boots on"

Beware of quoting anything from Fox News, they're rabidly pro-Trump and anti-China (and Mexico, and France, and Turkey, and...)
China sent 5.5 million test kits of which 9000 (less than 0.2%) turned out to be faulty and were sent back. Which means more than 99.8% weren't faulty and will help save lives.
"The time and money Spain wasted on faulty supplies could have devastating effects''..." -- clickbait bullsh*t, along with the headline. Typical Fox News...

A friend told me last night that some pubs "oop North" are giving beer away instead of pouring it down the drain -- barrel outside the pub, help yourself.
Here "dahn Sarf" some pubs are selling takeaway beer at a couple of quid a pint instead of throwing it way...